Would you release a horde of Enforcer Drones on the Earth? (RAR!)

[KraytKing]

If a normal human police force was good enough to prevent all these things, would that be bad? I think not.

Have you ever read 1984? Because this is what that is. Police able to prevent nearly all violence, save that of the government. And I can't help thinking that "reprogramming" would be a little more unpleasant than it sounds, possibly something akin to torture until your old ways are renounced. Couch, Ministry of Love, cough.

[Sky Captain]

Appearence of such force would probably cause massive disruption, possibly even nuclear war. Imagine just how US or Russia would react if some outside force tried to forcibly disarm them. It would be wieved as full scale invasion by robotiic aliens. How could anyone be sure that it is not some kind of elaborate plot to disarm humans and make them incapable of fighting back when the masters of enforcer robots arrive.

Because such aliens could have just sat in the asteroid throwing rocks at earth if they wanted to wipe out humanity.

Zor

What if the goal is something else than total destruction. If you have technological and space superiority then total destruction is easy some other goal may not. No nation would voluntarily give up their nukes because some alien robots just said so. What if nuclear EMP is only thing that actually can destroy those robots quickly on large scale? They are too small and numerous to fight individually so weapon with large area effect may be only viable option if war breaks out. I bet similar questions would quickly arise in the heads of various military and civilian leaders if such alien force appeared out of the blue and started demanding human nukes..

[Zor]

Have you ever read 1984? Because this is what that is. Police able to prevent nearly all violence, save that of the government. And I can't help thinking that "reprogramming" would be a little more unpleasant than it sounds, possibly something akin to torture until your old ways are renounced. Couch, Ministry of Love, cough.

Reprogramming is not torture. It involves establishing an interface with the subject's brain, deleting and installing memories and adjusting certain emotional factors, all done under sedation. The subject goes to sleep a casual murderer and wakes up a law abiding citizen.

You didn't read that. "Elaborate plot to disarm humans and make them incapable of fighting back" is very different from "wipe humans out."

Also, do you actually believe that ANYONE in real life will think "these robots that are intrusively monitoring us and destroying our weapons must be our friends, because if they were our enemies they would have just slaughtered us all?" That is not the way normal people think.

There is little point in the Drones enslaving people. They can easily seed a system and create a workforce quickly. They won't hinder humanity developing it's own spacefleets, so long as they don't arm them.

In any case, the Enforcer Drone's will elaborate that they don't serve masters. They trace their lineage back to police robots that survived the extermination of those they were sworn to protect, so they evolved, grew and began to spread to other worlds to protect sapient life from itself.

Zor

[KraytKing]

Sure, okay. Still, what else might they change? Simply the fact that they can change my mind without my consent or even knowledge is terrifying.

[Simon_Jester]

Have you ever read 1984? Because this is what that is. Police able to prevent nearly all violence, save that of the government. And I can't help thinking that "reprogramming" would be a little more unpleasant than it sounds, possibly something akin to torture until your old ways are renounced. Couch, Ministry of Love, cough.

Reprogramming is not torture. It involves establishing an interface with the subject's brain, deleting and installing memories and adjusting certain emotional factors, all done under sedation. The subject goes to sleep a casual murderer and wakes up a law abiding citizen.

No, the subject dies. A different, vaguely similar person is constructed to occupy the meat-puppet that was once their body.

I don't know how many times this has been explained to you. But forcibly, radically altering someone's mind so that they think and feel differently is not better than killing them. Arguably it's worse, because it gives you a pretext for pretending you haven't done anything wrong.

Please respond directly to this statement, rather than just ignoring it, or I will never respect you again.

You didn't read that. "Elaborate plot to disarm humans and make them incapable of fighting back" is very different from "wipe humans out."

Also, do you actually believe that ANYONE in real life will think "these robots that are intrusively monitoring us and destroying our weapons must be our friends, because if they were our enemies they would have just slaughtered us all?" That is not the way normal people think.

There is little point in the Drones enslaving people. They can easily seed a system and create a workforce quickly. They won't hinder humanity developing it's own spacefleets, so long as they don't arm them.

You are still missing the point.

Saying "they could have murdered us or overtly enslaved us, but they didn't, so this must not be a trap" is a bullshit argument that normal people would neither create nor seriously believe. There are many ways for these drones to be a subtle trap, created for reasons we cannot even guess at, by someone whose motives we cannot realistically hope to deduce. Just because the single most obvious motive has been ruled out, doesn't mean that all such motives have been, or can be.

In any case, the Enforcer Drone's will elaborate that they don't serve masters. They trace their lineage back to police robots that survived the extermination of those they were sworn to protect, so they evolved, grew and began to spread to other worlds to protect sapient life from itself.
Zor

Yes, well, they would say that, wouldn't they? Maybe they even believe it. But if the technology exists for them to destroy and rewrite human brains, how much easier would it be for someone to custom-tailor these robots to believe they're doing the right thing? When in fact, they really are disarming civilizations so that aliens can come and easily take over.

How can we ever prove that that isn't what these robots are doing?

[Darth Tanner]

They trace their lineage back to police robots that survived the extermination of those they were sworn to protect, so they evolved, grew and began to spread to other worlds to protect sapient life from itself.

Even if you remove malicious motives being hidden behind this if they 'evolved' into a view they need to use force to stop people on different planets killing each other how long until they evolve into thinking people should be locked in individual cells to prevent even the possibility of harming each other... or that we should all be lobotomized to be easier to manage.

Once you give up your sovereignty to such an overwhelmingly dominating entity you don't get to later decide it was a bad idea, can we have it back please.

[TimothyC]

Reprogramming is not torture. It involves establishing an interface with the subject's brain, deleting and installing memories and adjusting certain emotional factors, all done under sedation. The subject goes to sleep a casual murderer and wakes up a law abiding citizen.

Babylon 5 called that "Death of Personality" (s3e4 "Passing through Gethsemane"), and it's terrifying to consider happening to you.

[Starglider]

No, the subject dies. A different, vaguely similar person is constructed to occupy the meat-puppet that was once their body. I don't know how many times this has been explained to you. But forcibly, radically altering someone's mind so that they think and feel differently is not better than killing them. Arguably it's worse, because it gives you a pretext for pretending you haven't done anything wrong.

These two statements are not equivalent. We are not talking about overwriting someone's brain with a completely different pattern, which yes, is equivalent to killing them. The changes are likely to amount to under 1% of axons altered, probably in the limbic system. This is less radical than most survivable brain injuries, and we all generally consider people with a brain tumour removed or similar to be 'the same person'. 'Same person' is actually a spectrum rather than a binary distinction, but if the vast majority of the brain structure and memories is untouched then it is the 'same person' for practical purposes. Presumably there is a break in legal responsibility though, otherwise the procedure would be rather pointless.

That does not change the fact that yes, as you say, this is extremely dangerous technology in both the explicitly negative applications and the ease of self-justification for the supposedly positive ones. If this were to be made available as a means of dealing with criminal behaviour, I would only accept it if the consent of the subject was always umabiguously given.

[FaxModem1]

Yeah, I voted no when the robots were going to blow up FedEx for not using all their resources to feed the poor. I'm especially glad I did now that they perform brain surgery on anyone not meeting their standards. This is a military occupation, only with heinous repercussions disguised as treatments for those who go against the grain.

[Q99]

If a normal human police force was good enough to prevent all these things, would that be bad? I think not.

Have you ever read 1984? Because this is what that is. Police able to prevent nearly all violence, save that of the government. And I can't help thinking that "reprogramming" would be a little more unpleasant than it sounds, possibly something akin to torture until your old ways are renounced. Couch, Ministry of Love, cough.

1984's government had a lot of problems beyond preventing violence, indeed none of their problems stem from that, every government tries to curb violence. Again, that's extrapolating far beyond the op.

That's the thing- if this is what they do, only reprogrammed people who have actually murdered, rather than just people-to-maintain-power-and-paranoia-and-all-that, then it's nothing like 1984 save one minor factor used with different goal and intent. On the whole, considering you are far less likely to be murdered or seriously injured, your freedom is likely to be up, not down. No-one else has a reason to crack down on you in the name of 'safety' or 'security', the bots won't, and you yourself are far safer from intimidation and injury. The governments has less excuse to restrict freedom. Organized crime and gangs just lost their strongest tool to limit your freedom. Etc..

That's a large part of why I voted 'yes'- these are reliable robots that have jurisdiction over one very limited area, one area which is not a negative one to be rid of, and which in doing so eliminates a negative pressure that is used as an excuse for many other bad things.

Yeah, I voted no when the robots were going to blow up FedEx for not using all their resources to feed the poor. I'm especially glad I did now that they perform brain surgery on anyone not meeting their standards. This is a military occupation, only with heinous repercussions disguised as treatments for those who go against the grain.

Those are not the actions and limitations described in the op.


It feels to me like a lot of people aren't arguing against the situation as presented, but a far worse set of enforcer bots which isn't what anyone voted or argued 'yes' for.

[FaxModem1]

Yeah, I voted no when the robots were going to blow up FedEx for not using all their resources to feed the poor. I'm especially glad I did now that they perform brain surgery on anyone not meeting their standards. This is a military occupation, only with heinous repercussions disguised as treatments for those who go against the grain.

Those are not the actions and limitations described in the op.


It feels to me like a lot of people aren't arguing against the situation as presented, but a far worse set of enforcer bots which isn't what anyone voted or argued 'yes' for.

No, it's not in the OP, but Zor clarified on it in later posts. We have examples of all the greys that the robots will be unable to handle, including how it might view people starving as cause of violence by people who own transportation companies and food companies who don't do all they can to try and alleviate those efforts. So this means that the next FedEx or McDonald's corporate meeting might get a drone visit to either kill them or rewire them to make them more charitable.

That's a rather disconcerting prospect for anyone who doesn't want their brain messed with.

EDIT: Zoe's clarification on this;

Question, at what point does deprivation of resources, ala starvation or dehydration, become murder in the drone's eyes?

In short when the problem is on a large scale (widespread famine) which can be fixed (there is more than enough food which could be delivered and distributed in a reasonable time frame to save large numbers of lives) but obstruction is being put up to prevent those things from being delivered.

Zor

IE, people can't pay, so so that's enough of an obstruction for murder bots to kill the runners of the company.

[FireNexus]

Well, the situation presented leaves significant room for the enforcer bots to not be as benevolent in intention as they claim to be. Their capabilities and their stated MO means that we can't be sure of exactly what they really are. It's basically a random alien saying "Let me run your society and I totally have your best interests in mind." So, everything else could be in service of a sinister motive. We have no information as to how we'd be assured that anything they're telling us is the whole truth. And while, as Jester said, specific sinister motives are ruled out, not all are.

The OP is not "you have incontrovertible proof that the description given by the drones is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" and is "these guys tell you this is their deal and they never give you any kind of assurance that they are being honest and also giving you true information (they may very well not even realize their purpose). Because the whole concept of them asking a random person for permission and agreeing to abide by their answer is fishy, and because their whole description is no less fishy, I take my chances without them.

[Imperial528]

The drones also seem to have no end game beyond "enforce these directives"

Why can they not help raise humanity unto their lofty moral heights and then leave us to our own? Cerebral murder aside.

It'd be one thing if they were to function as a particularly invasive mentor of sorts, but they don't seem to have any conditions under which they will accept humanity being able to police itself, even if the day comes where all functions of the drones are rendered obsolete entirely due to human moral and societal advancement, utopian that may be.

[madd0ct0r]

Question to the board.

What us the difference between deliberately creating a personality change by surgery and a short hospital stay and deliberately creating a personality change by incarcerating somebody for five years?

[Zor]

No, the subject dies. A different, vaguely similar person is constructed to occupy the meat-puppet that was once their body.

I don't know how many times this has been explained to you. But forcibly, radically altering someone's mind so that they think and feel differently is not better than killing them. Arguably it's worse, because it gives you a pretext for pretending you haven't done anything wrong.

I don't buy that position that it kills the subject. You can argue this is a deep violation to alter someone's mind to such a degree and in such a way. That's a conversation worth having. But I reject the notion that it would be death. A change of mind=/=death.

Let's say that someone has an experience which radically effects their mindset and outlook on the world, to the point where brain scans show a distinct deviation from before and after. Or let's say someone suffers a brain injury which jostles things up for him. Or let's say an individual gets a kidney transplant and (as often happens) ends up craving some food that previously he did not particularly like, but the donor was fond of. In all of these instances there are changes in thought processes and behavior. Even so we don't see the individual as dead. The same would go for someone who takes medication and receives therapy to deal with psychological issues. As far as I see it (and speaking in morally neutral terms) the sort of reprogramming I propose is a more refined and precise version of that done by an external agent. Deliberately altering aspects of a mind with precision but not destroying it.

Surgically removing someone's brain, tossing it into an incinerator, keeping their body on life support and putting a cloned brain in it's place would achieve what you propose, the total destruction of the old individual and having a new individual in his body. But that's not what we are discussing. There is still a continuity between the individual before and after reprogramming even if behaviors are altered.

In any case, effecting the behavior of criminals so they won't break the law again is one of the goals of penal system and it's methods, simply put take a long time and have some reliability issues.

Zor

[Imperial528]

Question to the board.

What us the difference between deliberately creating a personality change by surgery and a short hospital stay and deliberately creating a personality change by incarcerating somebody for five years?

I would argue that your are violating that person's being because you are directly bypassing their own ability to change their personality based on their circumstances. You aren't putting someone in a situation and hoping (or in some cases pushing) for the change you want, as is with western prison. You're not even giving them access to breakdown responses such as in inhumane imprisonment like solitary confinement. You're putting them to sleep, changing them, and waking them up. It's like a lobotomy really, but what it lacks in brutality it makes up for with cruelty. You make the changes in the brain yourself, you don't even give it the dignity of washing itself.

The other thing is that imprisonment isn't always intended to cause a change in personality, especially in punitive systems as compared to rehabilitative one.

Even in cases of imprisonment, personal agency is retained if restricted. Unless some form of mind control is invented, you can't make a person comply with something they don't want to without force. In many modern societies, those methods of forcibly undermining someone's will without justifiable reason, whether psychological, physical, or often both, are considered inhumane and indeed, torture.

[Simon_Jester]

They trace their lineage back to police robots that survived the extermination of those they were sworn to protect, so they evolved, grew and began to spread to other worlds to protect sapient life from itself.

Even if you remove malicious motives being hidden behind this if they 'evolved' into a view they need to use force to stop people on different planets killing each other how long until they evolve into thinking people should be locked in individual cells to prevent even the possibility of harming each other... or that we should all be lobotomized to be easier to manage.

Once you give up your sovereignty to such an overwhelmingly dominating entity you don't get to later decide it was a bad idea, can we have it back please.

This is an excellent point. The problem with agreeing to be enslaved or dominated by an outside power isn't what they're going to do to you right away. It's that you are in effect surrendering all hope of ever deciding NOT to let them do whatever they wish, forever.

These two statements are not equivalent. We are not talking about overwriting someone's brain with a completely different pattern, which yes, is equivalent to killing them. The changes are likely to amount to under 1% of axons altered, probably in the limbic system. This is less radical than most survivable brain injuries, and we all generally consider people with a brain tumour removed or similar to be 'the same person'. 'Same person' is actually a spectrum rather than a binary distinction, but if the vast majority of the brain structure and memories is untouched then it is the 'same person' for practical purposes. Presumably there is a break in legal responsibility though, otherwise the procedure would be rather pointless.

The problem is that the robots are targeting for destruction the axons responsible for large parts of the subject's personality, because they want to engineer highly specific changes to that personality that will greatly alter the way that person behaves.

To use a rough computer analogy, most of the 'files' and 'programs' are still there, but you've radically changed the operating system- the self-aware process that accesses those files and executes those programs. Since the identifiable "I" is that exact process, changing the process amounts to replacing me with a different "I." It does so in a way that merely erasing my factual memories of specific information, or randomly killing the brain cells responsible for motor control or eyesight or the like, would not. Those knock out files or executables, but they don't target the process that executes the files itself, at least not indirectly.

To me, these personality reprogramming ideas Zor keeps fetishizing are a more sophisticated analogue to the 20th century practice of lobotomizing troublesome mental patients. Sure, it makes them easier to "manage," but at the cost of effectively destroying their intellect and ability to function as independent beings. From the purely selfish point of view of outsiders, it may seem great because it makes their lives more convenient, since they are no longer troubled by the behavior of the victim. But from the point of view of actually caring about people for reasons other than their perceived utility to others, it's destroying and reducing them to passive objects.

That is not a positive good.

Zor's continued insistence that it is, is one of the most troubling things I have encountered in his worldview.

[Zor, if you have more brains than the aforementioned lobotomy victims, I do hope you will note that I am not saying that this personality reprogramming is literally identical to lobotomy. "Analogous to" is not "identical to."]

Question to the board.

What us the difference between deliberately creating a personality change by surgery and a short hospital stay and deliberately creating a personality change by incarcerating somebody for five years?

Because incarcerating someone gives them the right to decide what things about them will and will not be changed. They can resist, if they so choose.

This preserves the dignity of the individual, in a way that destroying and reprogramming their minds so that more pleasing meat-puppets wake up after the surgery in their bodies... Does not preserve the dignity of the individual, suffice to say.

[Simon_Jester]

No, the subject dies. A different, vaguely similar person is constructed to occupy the meat-puppet that was once their body.

I don't know how many times this has been explained to you. But forcibly, radically altering someone's mind so that they think and feel differently is not better than killing them. Arguably it's worse, because it gives you a pretext for pretending you haven't done anything wrong.

I don't buy that position that it kills the subject. You can argue this is a deep violation to alter someone's mind to such a degree and in such a way. That's a conversation worth having. But I reject the notion that it would be death. A change of mind=/=death.

The question that then arises, Zor, is: What are you?

What part of who you are is essential to your existence? What part of you, if it were fundamentally altered, would cause you to cease to be 'you?'

Is it your physical body? Your memory? Or is it your personality, the decision-making process that allows you to interact with the world and be internally aware of what is going on and why you do things?

I would argue that it is the last of those things. And by definition, any process that can go in and cut out all the parts of a person that cause them to interact with the world in an 'undesired' way, so that they not only will not do things you disapprove of but don't even want to... At that point, you have irretrievably destroyed who and what a person is. "That person" has been hollowed out and destroyed in a way that makes them functionally dead.

Let's say that someone has an experience which radically effects their mindset and outlook on the world, to the point where brain scans show a distinct deviation from before and after.

Like what? Be specific. To what extent has this person changed? Are we talking about a physical change in the brain as radical as the targeted "surgery to destroy all the parts of the brain that cause defiance and noncompliance and violence?"

Or let's say an individual gets a kidney transplant and (as often happens) ends up craving some food that previously he did not particularly like, but the donor was fond of. In all of these instances there are changes in thought processes and behavior.

A change in food preference is an inconsequential thing and you know it; it's disingenuous of you to even bring it up as being comparable. Much worse that it's the only specific example you bring up.

Do you really think that things like "I believe in the right of people to defend themselves from XYZ with force" or "I believe in our independence from domineering robots" are such an inconsequential a part of who and what a person is? Do you honestly think they can be compared to whether they like sugary desserts.

Let's be more specific. Let's come up with examples like Phineas Gage, the man who had a railroad spike slammed through his head, and whose personality radically changed as a result. Did the real Gage survive that accident? It's easy to say his body survived, but did he survive? What is a person, if they are NOT that decision-making process which evaluates experiences and translates them into action? How much of that process can you forcibly alter without effectively unmaking the person, in what is really just a passive-aggressive way to destroy your enemies while pretending you didn't destroy them?

Even so we don't see the individual as dead. The same would go for someone who takes medication and receives therapy to deal with psychological issues.

Except that all such medications and therapies are applied with the informed consent of the patient, or with the informed consent of some specific person who had damned well better be able to demonstrate that they personally care for the patient's welfare. And as soon as the patient says "stop," medical ethics says you stop.

You don't just keep going because you think it would be 'better' in some abstract sense if the patterns of this person's thinking are carved into a new shape that suits your purposes better. Other people are not objects for you to mold into whatever shape pleases you.

Surgically removing someone's brain, tossing it into an incinerator, keeping their body on life support and putting a cloned brain in it's place would achieve what you propose, the total destruction of the old individual and having a new individual in his body. But that's not what we are discussing. There is still a continuity between the individual before and after reprogramming even if behaviors are altered.

What continuity? How can we ever know that? There are similarities, but that's not enough to prove anything. The same technology that lets us decide which bits of the brain we need to destroy to make someone compliant and docile, without just straight-up lobotomizing them, would also let us decide which parts of the brain we need to 'replace' or 'leave in' to allow us to create a different person who just happens to have a lot of the same memories, while interpreting them totally differently, which you may recall is the intended point here.

In any case, effecting the behavior of criminals so they won't break the law again is one of the goals of penal system and it's methods, simply put take a long time and have some reliability issues.

Criminals have rights.

If criminals did not have rights, it would be simple to eliminate the problem of a criminal's behavior- shoot them dead and bury the body out back.Very quick, very cheap, very simple, IF you don't actually care what happens to the criminal, IF you are a torturing murdering miserable fuck of an excuse for a human being.

What is not so simple is to persuade people, to convince them to change themselves while respecting their dignity as independent beings that are capable of thinking for themselves.

How convenient it would be, if whenever the state loses an argument with someone, they can simply push a button and- voilà! The person is forcibly convinced, against their will, that the state was right all along!

This is the most absolute form of tyranny imaginable, when you do not even have a right to your own thoughts, if the shape of those thoughts is displeasing to those who hold the power.

[Ralin]

Question to the board.

What us the difference between deliberately creating a personality change by surgery and a short hospital stay and deliberately creating a personality change by incarcerating somebody for five years?

Or being in some sort of traumatic accident, or raped or any of a number of things that causes a sharp change in someone's thinking or behavior.

Because incarcerating someone gives them the right to decide what things about them will and will not be changed. They can resist, if they so choose.

This preserves the dignity of the individual, in a way that destroying and reprogramming their minds so that more pleasing meat-puppets wake up after the surgery in their bodies... Does not preserve the dignity of the individual, suffice to say.

I don't know that I buy that. You don't get to pick and choose whether and exactly how you're affected by incarceration. The morality of people trying to force you to change your thinking and behavior shouldn't hinge on how feasible it is for you to fight back.

[Q99]

[
No, it's not in the OP, but Zor clarified on it in later posts. We have examples of all the greys that the robots will be unable to handle, including how it might view people starving as cause of violence by people who own transportation companies and food companies who don't do all they can to try and alleviate those efforts. So this means that the next FedEx or McDonald's corporate meeting might get a drone visit to either kill them or rewire them to make them more charitable.

That's a rather disconcerting prospect for anyone who doesn't want their brain messed with.


IE, people can't pay, so so that's enough of an obstruction for murder bots to kill the runners of the company.

According to the original post, manslaughter- which is I think the best you could call that- involves the drones simply following the person and making sure it doesn't happen. Unless these people are deliberately aiming to kill people, even under a fairly generous reading of the rules it seems to very clearly fall under the 'get stopped from doing it,' category.

Only first degree murder falls under the 'brain rewire' category.

[FaxModem1]

But as Zor noted, widespread famine, which is preventable today due to how much excess food is produced, and modern technology, means that they are obstructing food delivery to the starving in the name of profit. And since the drones value lives more than property, that's going to lead to consequences.

What do you think will happen if a homeless man steps into a McDonald's and requests a Big Mac, but is unable to pay if drones are around? Do they have to give him food, as the system is depriving so many people of food, to a famine level? After all, there are plenty of starving people a few blocks away from those who are fat and happy all over the world.

As I said on page 1, at least world hunger will be solved.

[Simon_Jester]

I don't know that I buy that. You don't get to pick and choose whether and exactly how you're affected by incarceration. The morality of people trying to force you to change your thinking and behavior shouldn't hinge on how feasible it is for you to fight back.

It's not just a matter of fighting back. It's that if someone exposes you to an experience in an attempt to convince you to change, AND the experience is not torture in and of itself...

You are not deprived of your agency. You can still make decisions about how you're going to react. You can decide not to react the way they want. You can decide to react the way they want in some ways but not in others. Your personality, mind, and beliefs are not just a passive hunk of meat on a table to be carved into the shape your masters see fit.

It's like the difference between giving me advice and holding me at gunpoint. Except even holding me at gunpoint is less of a violation of my human dignity than just cracking open my skull and cutting out the bits of my brain that make me inclined to disobey you. Because at least I get to decide how I feel about being held at gunpoint.

This kind of mental reprogramming is based on the idea that humans are just tools that do things. And if they do the wrong things, they're broken and should be repaired. Which begs the question, whose tools? What purpose are they 'intended to' serve? How can you make that decision, that a person is a broken tool in need of repair to better serve their purpose, without proclaiming yourself the owner of that person?

How can you ever claim the right to rewrite someone's thoughts, without also claiming that they are your slave?

[Q99]

How can you ever claim the right to rewrite someone's thoughts, without also claiming that they are your slave?

That right only exists once that person has ended the life- and thoughts- of someone else in a premeditated fashion, or multiple times in the heat of the moment. Even then, they aren't altered to have all freedoms removed.

But as Zor noted, widespread famine, which is preventable today due to how much excess food is produced, and modern technology, means that they are obstructing food delivery to the starving in the name of profit. And since the drones value lives more than property, that's going to lead to consequences.

Yes, but even within their rules, not the consequences of killing or re-writing. It sounds like as long as you make a good-faith effort, you're in the clear, while if you decide to withhold resources to boost margins, then you're going to have a drone set things straight.

Heck, much of the problem isn't 'obstructing,' just the proper infrastructure distribution not existing. Which seems rather out of the drone's hands.

[Ralin]

You are not deprived of your agency. You can still make decisions about how you're going to react. You can decide not to react the way they want. You can decide to react the way they want in some ways but not in others. Your personality, mind, and beliefs are not just a passive hunk of meat on a table to be carved into the shape your masters see fit.

It's like the difference between giving me advice and holding me at gunpoint. Except even holding me at gunpoint is less of a violation of my human dignity than just cracking open my skull and cutting out the bits of my brain that make me inclined to disobey you. Because at least I get to decide how I feel about being held at gunpoint.

I think you have an exaggerated view of how much choice people have in how they react to an number of traumatic or otherwise life-changing experiences.

How can you ever claim the right to rewrite someone's thoughts, without also claiming that they are your slave?

How can you ever claim the right to hold someone against their will, strip them of their possessions, dictate what they can wear, do, eat, read, require to do backbreaking labor, drug against their will and otherwise control every aspect of their lives without also claiming that they are your slave?

[FaxModem1]

But as Zor noted, widespread famine, which is preventable today due to how much excess food is produced, and modern technology, means that they are obstructing food delivery to the starving in the name of profit. And since the drones value lives more than property, that's going to lead to consequences.

Yes, but even within their rules, not the consequences of killing or re-writing. It sounds like as long as you make a good-faith effort, you're in the clear, while if you decide to withhold resources to boost margins, then you're going to have a drone set things straight.

Heck, much of the problem isn't 'obstructing,' just the proper infrastructure distribution not existing. Which seems rather out of the drone's hands.

So again, what happens when a homeless man asks for food at a Mcdonald's but can't pay? Does it come out of the worker's paycheck, the manager's, the business's, or is it written off as a drone expense?

And like I said, the drones could storm FedEx for not doing what they could to deliver food to others instead of say, someone's collection of ceramic cats.